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Alicorn comments on Open Thread: November 2009 - Less Wrong
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I think I don't hear it from my male classmates because they aren't alert to this need. I would be pleased to hear one of them acknowledge it. This may have something to do with the fact that I'd trust most of them to be motivated by something other than a desire for eye candy or dating opportunities, though, if they did express this concern.
"I think I don't hear it from my male classmates because they aren't alert to this need. I would be pleased to hear one of them acknowledge it."
Why do you feel there is a need for more female philosophy students in your department?
I think a more balanced ratio would help the professors learn to be sensitive to the different typical needs of female students (e.g. decrease reliance on the "football coach" approach). Indirectly, more female students means more female Ph.Ds means more female professors means more female philosophy role models means more female students, until ideally contemporary philosophy isn't so terribly skewed. More female students would also increase the chance that there would be more female philosophers outside the typical "soft options" (history and ethics and feminist philosophy), which would improve the reception I and other female philosophers would get when proposing ideas on non-soft topics like metaphysics because we'd no longer look atypical for the sort of person who has good ideas on metaphysics.
That's what we hoped for in the physical/biological sciences. Then we discovered we had a glass ceiling problem. We have more than enough female grads now, more than half in some programs, but not enough become PhD students. Last I heard, people who were looking into solving this problem had come to a conclusion that it wouldn't just resolve itself with time and needed active intervention, in part by deliberately creating female role models. (They're trying but so far no very notable successes on the statistical level.)
This is true for my university (Hebrew U of Jerusalem) and other Israeli universities, and from what I'd heard in many other parts of the Western world as well. Is your philosophy dept. different?
When I talk about "my department", I mean the grad students - we don't interact very much with any but the most avid undergrads, except in the capacity of the TA/student relationship. So by saying that we need more girls, I mean we need more female Ph.D students.
Oh right, sorry :-) I assume the undergrad's POV too easily because I am one.
When existing grad students, who will eventually become professors, want more girls, that should be the best and most direct solution. I wish your department all success in this.
There seems, thankfully, to be some new attention by the admissions people to the issue. I was the only girl admitted in my year, but this year we got two. (Also, two of the new admits were minority races, while I don't think that's the case with any but perhaps a couple of ABDs who were here already.)
Out of how many total people admitted each year?
I was one of five; I think this year there were seven total.
Edit: Total for the whole department, we have 43 students, eight of whom are female (counting me).